The Solidarity Encounter between Indigenous Women and White Women in a Contemporary Canadian Context

This dissertation tracks the gendered operation of white settler liberal subjectivity at a specific site of settler colonial relations—the “solidarity encounter” between Indigenous women and white women in Canada. Through in-depth qualitative analysis of interviews and self-reflection (as a white settler woman ally), I examine the encounter’s intersubjective relations, shining the theoretical spotlight on how white women negotiate our tenuous status as settlers. Attentive to the complexity of these relations, including how white women allies grapple with our dominant positionality, I signal the perniciousness of white settler liberal subjectivity and the deep quest for legitimacy/innocence at its core. This quest, I argue, manifests itself as a white desire for proximity to Indigenous women, which in turn takes various forms and is often experienced by Indigenous women as invasive. I dedicate three chapters to mapping the sometimes subtle expressions of this desire (e.g., the need for acceptance, inclusion, forgiveness, healing, empowerment/purpose, friendship) and its role in liberal self-making projects, i.e., how it serves to negate colonial hierarchies and/or white settler women’s colonial complicity therein. Further, I develop the concept of the “impulse to solidarity”—the bundle of desires and discursive practices that propels white settler women in their pursuit of proximity, an impulse related to, but distinct from the “helping imperative” (Heron, 2007). White women allies find it difficult to resist the gendered dictates of liberal subjectivity, which in a settler colonial context demand our reproduction as legitimate national subjects vis-à-vis Indigenous women Others. Despite the inescapability of the “colonial present” (Gregory, 2004), I also note a cautious optimism among participants regarding the possibility of non-colonizing solidarity. I propose a framework for reconfiguring intersubjective relations in the solidarity encounter best encapsulated by the directive “step back, but not out.” Struck by pervasive spatial references in participant narratives, I characterize the problem (colonizing solidarity) and its solution (non-colonizing solidarity) in spatialized terms—white settler women must interrogate and curb our solidarity impulse and related practices of proximity. We must recognize when settler liberal self-interest takes centre stage, compels us to “come too close” and diminishes the collective political work of solidarity.

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